Unexpected

Northwestern France, Lille.

Outside the headquarters of France's Southern Netherlands Army Group.

Joseph raised an August 1790 Jäger Rifle and aimed at a small wooden barrel more than a hundred paces away. Then, holding his breath, he pulled the trigger.

With a thunderous bang, the spinning bullet flew straight toward its target.

The next instant, splinters of wood flew everywhere, and a palm-sized hole appeared in the middle of the barrel.

Joseph looked at the distant barrel with satisfaction, propped up the rifle, took the gunpowder pouch from Eman, and poured powder into the muzzle. He then inserted a lead bullet and used the ramrod to drive it firmly home.

The loading process was extremely easy. To outsiders, the weapon in his hands would certainly have appeared to be a smoothbore musket.

Yet the August 1790 was a genuine rifled gun.

It not only had a terrifying range, but was also extraordinarily accurate.

According to Berthier, elite veterans of the Jäger Battalion could hit a human-sized target from 200 paces away.

Ordinarily, that distance was territory reserved for cannon. When an ordinary flintlock gun fired at a target seventy paces away, whether it hit depended entirely on faith.

Although every country now had Jäger equipped with rifled guns, their loading time was more than half again as long as that of the August 1790 using the Thouvenin System.

Thus, the vast majority of Jäger existed only in company-level formations—mainly to seize opportunities on the battlefield to pick off officers. Given their rate of fire, having too many of them would instead hamper combat effectiveness.

France's Jäger, however, were organized at battalion level. And as the Ordnance Factory's output continued to rise, Jäger Regiments would soon be expanded as well.

This was because the August 1790 had an extremely high rate